There’s no doubt that if you are typing 12 hours a day, having a crappy keyboard is really frustrating.
A few quick notes. While the Apple keyboards for instance do work are OK, the true aficionado needs a mechanical keyboard.
So here are some reviews. Hobgear is one person’s view. Note that these are “compact” keyboards, so have 87 keys (no number pad) and you can carry them around. There are also 101-key with the number pad which is useful for some types of work (like Ubuntu with the way it does keyboard Grid switching). But they are less portable. For those, the Corsair K70 is a great choice fyi.
- Filco Ninja Magestouch. This is the top rated one. The so called ten keyless version is light and its a little unusual in that the keycaps are on the front, so you don’t type on them. It’s $150 for the ten keyless with Cherry Brown (these are smooth actuation) or $135 for Cherry Blue (my favorite, these are noisy and clicks, but feel definite).
- CM Storm QuickFire Rapid. It’s nice because it has a few keycap pullers. As an aside, on the Mac keyboard, the CTRL, Option and Delete keys are different. You can use a simple keyboard remapper to fix this. It’s quite a bit cheaper and nearly the same performance at $95 for the Brown.
- WASD Keyboards CODE. These are Cherry Blue or Brown and they have a DIP switch so the keyboard mapping works. It also has LED Backlighting which I actually kind of like. It’s $145.
